This month id explores architecture on the go and the speed of Italian design.

MOBITECTURE: ARCHITECTURE ON THE MOVE By Rebecca Roke Phaidon

As our journeys expand via Airbnb and endless digital escapades, it behooves us to reconsider our notions of home, structure, escape and destination. This exciting new volume catalogues contemporary notions of mobile architecture that not only expand our geo-spatial reality, but also our ways of understanding the world.

Organised into eight chapters, its 320 pages feature a visually compelling guidebook style with over 250 colour photos that present readers with internationally designed mobile configurations for cities, deserts, jungles and any other terrain imaginable. Its powerful introduction sets the stage for understanding the urgency for these projects that demand nuanced creativity and technical savvy.

Designed with purpose and passion, the projects range from high-tech sleds to structures that assist refugees and victims of natural disasters and inhumane conditions. Projects include a Lebanese-designed Emergency Plastic Crate Shelter, Architecture Global Aid’s Origami Paper House, a floating archipelago cinema in Thailand, plus many other projects that challenge architects to embrace disciplinary reflexivity.

With its eye looking towards the future, this volume is an exceptional exercise in envisioning architecture’s unavoidable challenges. Ideal for architects, entrepreneurs, designers and futurists.

STANZE/ROOMS: NOVEL LIVING CONCEPTS Edited by Beppe Finessi Marsilio

Last month, Salone del Mobile celebrated decades of success. This important new volume is a reminder of why it’s still the top design destination. Presented in Italian and English, it celebrates the XXI Triennale di Milano International Exhibition of ‘ Rooms. Novel living concepts’, one of the most important exhibitions hosted by Salone. A tome of visual splendour, it offers a compelling examination of the exhibition’s eleven rooms.

Introduced by Claudio de Albertis, the President of the Triennale di Milano, and Roberto Snaidero, President of Salone del Mobile Milano, it boasts almost 450 pages with 250 projects and 1000 archival images.

Using a century of Italy’s top interior design, Umberto Riva, Alessandro Mendini, Manolo De Giorgi, Lazzarini & Pickering, Marta Laudani & Marco Romanelli, Andrea Anastasio, Fabio Novembre, Duilio Forte, Elisabetta Terragni, Carlo Ratti and Francesco Librizzi use their rooms to present two dimensions of interior architecture: a concrete, functional one; and a conceptual one.

A must-have for designers and collectors, this stunning volume is as much a history of Italy as it is a compendium of design history.